the hot new programming language

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:18:29 -0400, bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 3:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:
It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

As someone who knows many folks who work in the software industry/game
design, it's kind of cute when EEs talk about things that they're so
very sure about...;-)

How many buffer overrun vulnerabilities has Windows had so far? Round
your answer to the nearest thousand.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.

And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

And braces plus indenting make it easy to see the structure of the
program, which I count on. C++ rocks.

I also like REXX.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 12:33:39 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
<langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den torsdag den 2. juli 2015 kl. 21.24.41 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:18:29 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 3:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:
It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

As someone who knows many folks who work in the software industry/game
design, it's kind of cute when EEs talk about things that they're so
very sure about...;-)

How many buffer overrun vulnerabilities has Windows had so far? Round
your answer to the nearest thousand.


and you know for certain that if only they had used ADA everything would
be perfect?

Not perfect, but runtime bounds checking and proper memory and stack
management keep strangers from executing data on your PC. And you
can't get wild pointers if you don't use pointers.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 13:21:24 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.

C is just an instruction set independent assembler. If you can program
a computer using native assembler. you can as well write the program
in C.

The other way around, knowing C doesn't imply that knowing platform
depended assembler is not that obvious.

 

[bitrex]

On 7/2/2015 4:12 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 12:33:39 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den torsdag den 2. juli 2015 kl. 21.24.41 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:18:29 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 3:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:
It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

As someone who knows many folks who work in the software industry/game
design, it's kind of cute when EEs talk about things that they're so
very sure about...;-)

How many buffer overrun vulnerabilities has Windows had so far? Round
your answer to the nearest thousand.


and you know for certain that if only they had used ADA everything would
be perfect?

Not perfect, but runtime bounds checking and proper memory and stack
management keep strangers from executing data on your PC. And you
can't get wild pointers if you don't use pointers.

Most of the coding dudes I know will happily talk your ear off slurring
dynamically-typed languages six ways from Sunday. They seem to really
like pure functional programming languages, or at least languages with
functional aspects, such as Rust, Go, and Haskell - which take great
steps to encourage type safety, thread safety, concurrency and
re-entrant coding style. Languages whose primary elements are functions
which are designed to have limited side-effects.

And you are going to pay a heavy performance price for not supporting
pointers, at least in some form, on most modern processor architectures.
Most processors have tons of opcodes in their ISA that support or
require indirection, so if your language isn't using pointers even the
best compiler is going to have some difficulty optimizing your code to
efficiently make use of machine primitives.

 

[bitrex]

On 7/2/2015 3:24 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:18:29 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 3:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:
It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

As someone who knows many folks who work in the software industry/game
design, it's kind of cute when EEs talk about things that they're so
very sure about...;-)

How many buffer overrun vulnerabilities has Windows had so far? Round
your answer to the nearest thousand.

I would feel fairly hard-pressed to use a Microsoft product as some kind
of archetypical example to give insight into what "Programmers" think, haha

 

[bitrex]

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.

They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:12:36 -0400, bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

That was 40 years ago.

Actually, the 11 had great memory management hardware, but c isn't
designed to be able to use it. Everything gets mixed up.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[bitrex]

On 7/2/2015 5:20 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:12:36 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

That was 40 years ago.

Actually, the 11 had great memory management hardware, but c isn't
designed to be able to use it. Everything gets mixed up.

Right, the main issue is what it always is, of course: nobody ever
expected the language to be as long-lived as it was, and then once it
becomes apparent that it actually is going to be around for a long time
they can't update it or add many new features for fear of breaking
backwards-compatability for a bunch of legacy shit

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 14:26:20 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
<langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den torsdag den 2. juli 2015 kl. 22.12.14 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 12:33:39 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den torsdag den 2. juli 2015 kl. 21.24.41 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:18:29 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 3:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:
It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

As someone who knows many folks who work in the software industry/game
design, it's kind of cute when EEs talk about things that they're so
very sure about...;-)

How many buffer overrun vulnerabilities has Windows had so far? Round
your answer to the nearest thousand.


and you know for certain that if only they had used ADA everything would
be perfect?

Not perfect, but runtime bounds checking and proper memory and stack
management keep strangers from executing data on your PC. And you
can't get wild pointers if you don't use pointers.


if you make sure your soldering iron never get over 50'C you won't burn you fingers if you grap the wrong end

-Lasse

I once dropped an iron and caught it in mid-air. Only once.

Some people can write bug-free, really solid c. Most programmers
can't. It's easier in embedded systems than in OSs and OS-level apps.

My people really like Python lately, for Windows and Linux engineering
and test software and such, not embedded. As an interpreter, it trades
performance for safety. We can always buy faster CPUs.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[rickman]

On 7/2/2015 3:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 11:51:54 -0700 (PDT),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 2:47:36 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:
On 7/2/2015 2:30 PM, bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 1:47:12 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


A bunch of apocryphal bullshyte, knee deep, from the department which to this day is un-auditable because of systemic incompetence and criminality.

Which department is this? Wikipedia, NBS or any of the many books
written and cited?

" It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. Intended as a temporary stopgap, the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption."

That part is right...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL


--

Rick

The language

It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

I don't get your opinion. You profess to having little experience with
programming so I can't imagine you actually know much about ADA or other
languages. You can spout off about all sorts of crap that you find on
the web about software, but you don't know diddly about it and that is
very obvious in everything you say, especially this.

I have worked with VHDL which is very similar to ADA and it is *no*
panacea to producing bug free software. The sorts of bugs that are
found by the ADA compiler are also found by C compilers if you just
allow the tool to work for you instead of ignoring it. They are *far*
from preventing all sorts of bugs.

Stick to things you actually know something about, eh?

--

Rick

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:29:33 -0400, bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 5:20 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:12:36 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

That was 40 years ago.

Actually, the 11 had great memory management hardware, but c isn't
designed to be able to use it. Everything gets mixed up.


Right, the main issue is what it always is, of course: nobody ever
expected the language to be as long-lived as it was, and then once it
becomes apparent that it actually is going to be around for a long time
they can't update it or add many new features for fear of breaking
backwards-compatability for a bunch of legacy shit

I'd think that a good c compiler and a modern CPU could separate
i/d/stack spaces and prevent dumb buffer errors at least. Executing
data is unforgivable.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[rickman]

On 7/2/2015 6:03 PM, John Larkin wrote:

We can always buy faster CPUs.

That is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen come from you.

--

Rick

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:03:28 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Gave us:

>I once dropped an iron and caught it in mid-air. Only once.

I helped a boss way back in '79 use chains and a hydraulic jack to
pull a nine inch triple pulley off of a down machine 2.5 inch shaft.

When it popped off, it really 'popped'. I caught it from banging the
ground a mere few inches from costing them several hundred 1970s era
dollars. He liked me from that day forward.

A few months later, a stuck button on a decades old chain hoist caused
me to crash one of their main machines, taking it down for a couple
days. He cussed himself for keeping that hoist in service for so long
after they knew it was screwed up. I did not know the button could ride
under the controller housing and get stuck. I was pissed at myself for
that.

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 7/2/2015 6:06 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:29:33 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 5:20 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:12:36 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

That was 40 years ago.

Actually, the 11 had great memory management hardware, but c isn't
designed to be able to use it. Everything gets mixed up.


Right, the main issue is what it always is, of course: nobody ever
expected the language to be as long-lived as it was, and then once it
becomes apparent that it actually is going to be around for a long time
they can't update it or add many new features for fear of breaking
backwards-compatability for a bunch of legacy shit

I'd think that a good c compiler and a modern CPU could separate
i/d/stack spaces and prevent dumb buffer errors at least. Executing
data is unforgivable.

They can, and do. It's all in the compiler options. There are also all
kinds of bounds-checked arrays and other security features in the C++
standard library. But they're optional, which is as it should be.

Otherwise you break a lot of code.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 7/2/2015 5:29 PM, bitrex wrote:

On 7/2/2015 5:20 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:12:36 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html


The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg
off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

That was 40 years ago.

Actually, the 11 had great memory management hardware, but c isn't
designed to be able to use it. Everything gets mixed up.


Right, the main issue is what it always is, of course: nobody ever
expected the language to be as long-lived as it was, and then once it
becomes apparent that it actually is going to be around for a long time
they can't update it or add many new features for fear of breaking
backwards-compatability for a bunch of legacy shit

Riiighhttt. Which is why C++11 is just the same as K&R 1.0.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 18:07:30 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 6:03 PM, John Larkin wrote:

We can always buy faster CPUs.

That is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen come from you.

You are being a jerk again. That seems to be your nature.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 18:38:27 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 6:06 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:29:33 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 5:20 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:12:36 -0400, bitrex
bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/2/2015 4:21 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:08:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 07/02/2015 01:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:21:42 +1000, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 2/07/2015 5:13 AM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2694378/college-students-learning-cobol-make-more-money.html

The revival of Basic is next.


Apparently people who can resist the urge to gnaw their own leg off from
boredom command a premium.

Sylvia.

Yup. Accountants. Lawyers. Plastic surgeons.

Cobol was designed so that bankers could code. It was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


And run screaming in the other direction. Cobol is verbose and
inflexible. Just the sheer amount of typing would slow me down a lot.

C was described as designed by geniuses to be used by geniuses. But
most programmers aren't geniuses. Most people need hard typing and
runtime bounds checking and proper memory management to keep out of
trouble; they need verbose. I cite basically all Microsoft products.


They weren't geniuses, they just knew that they couldn't do fucking
runtime bounds checking and "proper" memory management on a PDP-11 with
as much processing power as a modern clock radio

That was 40 years ago.

Actually, the 11 had great memory management hardware, but c isn't
designed to be able to use it. Everything gets mixed up.


Right, the main issue is what it always is, of course: nobody ever
expected the language to be as long-lived as it was, and then once it
becomes apparent that it actually is going to be around for a long time
they can't update it or add many new features for fear of breaking
backwards-compatability for a bunch of legacy shit

I'd think that a good c compiler and a modern CPU could separate
i/d/stack spaces and prevent dumb buffer errors at least. Executing
data is unforgivable.



They can, and do. It's all in the compiler options. There are also all
kinds of bounds-checked arrays and other security features in the C++
standard library. But they're optional, which is as it should be.

Otherwise you break a lot of code.

Addressing out of bounds and executing data *should* be broken. By the
hardware.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Joe Gwinn]

In article <3e2bpap8e70o7mnep2joboecjrdsggpp96@4ax.com>, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 11:51:54 -0700 (PDT),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 2:47:36 PM UTC-4, rickman wrote:
On 7/2/2015 2:30 PM, bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 1:47:12 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#History_and_specification

Two of the designers were women, who were apparently more interested
in solving a real problem than they were interested in playing mental
games. Compare Cobol to c or Pascal or APL.


A bunch of apocryphal bullshyte, knee deep, from the department which to
this day is un-auditable because of systemic incompetence and
criminality.

Which department is this? Wikipedia, NBS or any of the many books
written and cited?

" It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a
portable programming language for data processing. Intended as a temporary
stopgap, the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to
provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption."

That part is right...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL


--

Rick

The language

It's a shame that ADA wasn't as widely accepted. Programmers tend to
hate safe languages that make them be careful.

In the day, I was one of the many programmers who suffered through
Ada83. I made a little career of making Ada run fast enough to be
plausible in realtime applications like radars.

The method was simple but brutal - remove all of Ada that didn't look
exactly like Pascal, and if that wasn't enough, resort to assembly.
This was still Ada enough to qualify as Ada, and to meet the DoD
mandate.

Datapoint: My team implemented what would now be called middleware in
a severe subset of Ada83 plus some assembly code on a DEC VAX to
replace a pure-Ada message communications infrastructure. The subset
Ada plus assembly approach was literally ten times faster than the pure
Ada, and saved the project.

By the time Ada95 came out, it was too late - C/C++ had won.

Ada died because it was designed by academics who had no notion of
realtime, and thus made blunder after blunder, such that not even a DoD
Mandate could save Ada.


Joe Gwinn